


even though she never burned

by aurora_borealis



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Backstory, Pre-A Game of Thrones
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-23
Updated: 2014-06-23
Packaged: 2018-02-05 20:35:54
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,153
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1831393
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aurora_borealis/pseuds/aurora_borealis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Melony from Lot Seven must be forgotten, and all the other things, the Other's things.<br/>(Some of the early years of Melisandre.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	even though she never burned

Melony does not like to think her name. It is a dangerous word. Every time she hears it, something bad happens. Someone is hurt or will be hurt, or there are consequences. Even hearing it in her mind puts her at an alarming state of alertness.  

She must never be too alert. She must always be careful.

If she is not there will be punishments. But there are always punishments anyway.

She can hardly ever get to sleep. She is alone, anyway. She has been alone since Lot Seven, when she was sold.

There is one candle in the sleeping quarters. It is small and there is so more melted wax hardened around the candle than there is any of the actual candle left. It is red and the fire on its wick that lights the whole crowded room is small, about the size of one of her fingertips. She has small fingertips. “Too small for hard work. She had better grow soon,” she heard one of the masters say once. It made her afraid.

She tries to look away from the candle. If keeps her eyes in the darkness she can get to sleep sleep, if she keeps her eyes in the darkness she won’t be afraid of it. If the candle goes out she’ll be in the dark. They all will. But she saw things in the small fire, If it goes out she’ll be alone with those things, that much she knows. Those aren’t things everyone can see. Not even the masters.

She doesn’t know why she’s seeing them.

Sometimes she looks back to it even when she’s supposed to sleep.

She doesn’t _want_ to want to see it. She can’t.

Fire shouldn’t do that. But it does, for her.

Xx

She hates being afraid. She hates the cold and the sickness and the death it brings (to her kind, to slaves),  she hates the fires and how they burn still bodies and she must take the ashes of these fire-bodies away in their small, ornate urns and the heat, she can feel it. She hates the words of the priests, because they are salvation for everyone, but they do not mean everyone.

Xx

She is so cold. The thin, threadbare, dirty fabric of her robe chafes against her cold skin as she wraps her arms around herself for some semblance of warmth.

In the corner of her eye she can see something in the fire. Almost like a falling star, in the flames. All of this is happening within the small fire, like the masters’ decorative glass globes with little scenes inside- mermaids swimming around shipwrecks, beasts on white mountains. It’s small, but it’s so real. She can nearly see it in the sky through the small window, and she closes her eyes and the sight in the fire is still in her mind.

_The night is dark and full of terrors,_ says the Red Priest. She is not meant to repeat, but she heard him, and his devotees. He is right.

She will be fine. She will have to be fine. Because she will be here her whole life, and that is more nights than she can think of, more darkness and terrors than she can imagine. She thinks the star in the fire must be a sign from R’hllor. To her, for some reason. There can’t have been a mistake. She can’t tell anyone now.

And so the nights pass by, and she lies there, her emaciated arms wrapped around herself in the cold, and the candle stays overhead, just enough to show some light and be reassuring, but not enough.

Most nights she stays awake staring at it in fear it will go out.

That would be a terrible sign.

Xx

“Melony.” She freezes, even feeling cold. She hates the cold. And she looks up, and the master hands her a bowl of stew. Her food for the day. It is an old battered bowl, not even half full.

She knows it’s nothing. But it’s all she has. It’s everything. She wonders how many days she could go without these bowls.

She doesn’t cry very much. It feels hot on her face. She’s always cold, but that heat and discomfort, the feel of the salt water- it makes her sick. It hurts. It’s wrong.

She dreams of crying, though, of all the real things in her life distorted to unreal levels of horror, things that cannot exist in the same place as she lives- but a part of her does not think they are false. She can hardly see them but she can sense them.

She wishes she never had to dream.

Xx

It burns one day. It all burns. Masters and slaves alike die, and she is outside while it happens, gathering wood for ceremonial pyres.

They die. They had always said fire is salvation and pure and holy. She wonders about that. She wonders if she never understood until now.

Xx

(The masters weren’t careful and were drinking and the fires got out of hand and everything went up in a wall of flames from the altars of candles and it kept going, and there was no water, only climbing columns of flame and smoke. If R’hllor is fire, the Great Other is the smoke and ash, because in this world there is not always ice and cold but there is always a good and bad, even if the two are not always easily distinguished from one another. Melony is not sleeping in the basement that collapses, not among the slave group that is crushed in their sleep by the foundations; she is not among the holy devotees burned or trapped among falling-in walls and ceilings. She manages to find a window, small, but she is small too, and she climbs through. The smoke nearly smothers her breathing but the flames do not touch her. She is close, but outside of the walls, she is by the courtyard that is surrounded by flame- but not burnt. The fire surrounds her, but from a distance, it is not coming closer but it is not down.

When it eventually dies down she is the one left, the only one left. They see her rise from the white ground that has been grayed by ash and smoke and debris, they see her, rag-wearing girl standing with hair that is almost red, not yet, but if you look in the light of the rising sun you can see the shade of auburn red glinting, coming out.

Her eyes have seen. Not everything, not the end, nor the beginning. A part of the middle, a small bit from each section of the cycle. It has seen more of her then she has seen of it.)

When she wakes up she feels new, and old, for a few moments.

Xx

She hears them when she tries to sleep, and wakes with the unreal sound of their dying calls in her ears. But then they stopped. It comes to her that if the priests and priestesses and novices and temple devotees and all else are correct, then it is not death that silenced them, because the soul lives on after death. The soul, the inside of someone, the true someone, their _self_ that lives on long after the seasons will end and long after every person in this temple dies and everyone who will remember them dies too.

People’s souls are meant to live after death. Their _souls_ stopped screaming. They realized they did not have to any longer because the fire could not hurt them any longer- in death they became pure. Close to God. Close enough to be what the good parts of the world is made of.

Are most people during their lives close to what the other parts of the world are made of, close to the force-thing called the Great Other, that is not _great_ but greatly terrible? There is no one she can ask.

She has pieced together what the priests have been saying. It’s strange. She’s been hearing it since she was born and not really taking it in.

They thought it was not meant for her. That is what they told her.

That is what the world around her seems like, it seems like she will never be free. _How can I find comfort in my soul if it is the only comfort I have?_

She has always done what she must do.

 Xx

R’hllor has spared her. That must have been it. That must be why the closest standing temple is run by someone who frees her, offers her life as a novice priestess.  

Not spared. No. She must have been chosen.

Xx

A priest is checking her pulse, giving her water. She has never been given this much water at once, nor this much food. She hardly knows what to do with it. She realizes she will have this amount now- she will be fed more than a small amount once a day, she can have water when she likes, she will wear robes, she will not suffer beatings or the whip or be sold to an even worse place for any reason or no reason at all. She may even leave- although now, she cannot think of why she would want to, why anyone would. She must not leave now. R'hllor has placed her here.

The priest is blessing her. He says the flames surrounded her, and he saw something in it, and it touched her. It is a lot for her to think about. “How old are you, child?” he asks her. He has not yet asked her name. She tries to think back all the years beyond count- the winters, the ceremonies, how old she must have been when she can first remember back-

“Six and ten,” she says. “No- more, or less, but only by a couple years, it must be. If I can think on it a while, I will know-”

“Do not worry, child,” he tells her. His voice is nice. She remembers some of the elders speaking to her this way, before they burned. _Before their souls rose,_ she reminds herself. “What is your name?”

For a moment she almost does not remember, but how could she forget? How could she ever forget? It is a moment before she says anything. “I want to do what some of the holy men and women do,” she begins. “I want to take a new name, a name from the texts of R’hllor.” _I want my soul to rise from then, I want my soul to rise from Melony, even though she never burned._

He looks honored, and hands her the temple’s great book. It is ancient, with varying shades of red in its cover and papers and ink.

There are names of women and men, places and creatures and celestial beings, all different letters, from all ancient times. This all happened, in a great world. It sounds to her how the fires looked when she didn’t know what they were, but now there is no mistaking what they must be.

_Melisandre_

It looks like Melony, for a moment. She cannot help but look at it.

_And after the death of Azor Ahai, Lightbringer was kept far beyond man, beneath the star the heavens named Melisandre. Lightbringer’s flame burned afterwards under the watchful light of Melisandre, for years beyond count, and will continue throughout every night and The Night._

She knows there are more important things in the world than Melony, things she must forget if she can continue. She must continue. The fires have been calling to her since she was a small child, she just never understood them, she could hardly even see into them. Still, she cannot make sense of them. She had not even known last night.

_I will be Melisandre,_ she tells herself. _I must leave the other things, the Other’s things._ There is a line of blood on her hand from when she had scraped it escaping. Red, a holy color, and flowing blood is life. She does not think it is painful. There are worse pains, other pains, that she knows.

She looks out the window at the city. It is the first time she has looked at it with freedom. The city is the first thing Melisandre will see, she realizes, and the red sun is close to setting, and the night will come.

But she must learn to live through the night.

Xx

That night she does not dream, or even sleep. She goes to the altar and looks at the candles and their flames the whole night long. She sees no vision in them, but she does see their light, their light that does not waver and is the color of the star.

Melisandre looks into the flame. She doesn't know it yet, but it looks back. 


End file.
